


hold me closer

by vaudelin



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Season/Series 15, Grief/Mourning, Handcuffed Together, M/M, Reconciliation, Sharing a Bed, Spells & Enchantments, background Sam/Rowena (implied)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 16:20:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22059967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vaudelin/pseuds/vaudelin
Summary: He returns that scowl Cas is giving him, then darts his gaze away. “Don’t think Chuck would bother tying us together. Not on the note we left him.”Rowena hums. “Then something else wants our handsome angel stuck fast by your side.”
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 18
Kudos: 219





	hold me closer

**Author's Note:**

> This would fit in somewhere after the events 14.20, with some alternate solution having occurred for getting the souls put back in Hell.

“Well, at least it’s nothing physically harmful,” Rowena concludes, the purple glow from her hands and eyes slowly fading. She nods as she backs away from Cas and Dean, seemingly satisfied with her response.

Dean isn’t satisfied with that answer. Not by a long shot. He takes a step toward her, indirectly tugging Cas along with him. “Of course it’s not physical. It’s a _spell_.”

Brows narrowed, Cas tilts his chin down and away, as if embarrassed by him. Dean can feel the heat from his body, Cas is standing so close. For a second, Dean’s stomach flips; maybe under other circumstances, this whole— _thing_ —would have been… fine, but anger still burns through him at the memory of Cas’s lies. His betrayal. The way Cas covered for Jack, and then Jack ended up—

Dean elbows Cas roughly, seeking distance. The heart coal of the last few days crackles hotly in his chest.

Rowena drags a dark look in Dean’s direction, one that speaks of bodies buried in places that will never see light again. “I know it’s a spell, you wee brain. It’s why you called me here, begging for help. Remember?”

Sam clears his throat, stepping between them, his arms outstretched and pacifying. Gently, he pulls the tome Rowena references free from her hands, and begins flipping through its pages on his own. “Does it say anything about possible causes of the tethering spell? Can it be worked by other witches, maybe by someone at a distance?”

“Yes, it’s possible,” Rowena says carefully, “but to find a source strong enough to cast a spell this powerful _and_ subtle?” Rowena pauses, contemplating. Airily, she asks, “You said you had a run-in with God lately?”

“I sense grace in our tethering,” Cas says roughly, the confirmation coming out like pulled teeth.

Dean scoffs, giving a sarcastic wave. “Oh, so he speaks.” He returns that scowl Cas is giving him, then darts his gaze away. “Don’t think Chuck would bother tying us together. Not on the note we left him.”

Rowena hums. “Then something else wants our handsome angel stuck fast by your side.”

As if reminding him of it, Dean steps as far away from Cas as he can manage—which isn’t much. He hunches over his crossed arms, protecting his space. Evading Cas’s renewed glare, Dean asks, “How long ‘til you can get rid of it?”

Rowena gives the short answer in a sigh, following it up with: “Honestly? Your best bet will be finding the condition that breaks it. These types of things usually want something simple to happen. Something to the point of the spell’s casting.”

“Great,” Dean grumbles, rubbing a hand over his face. He scrubs at the grit building in his eye. “Well, if you figure it out, you know where to find me. Us.”

Dean waves away Rowena and Sam’s protests, flagging a hand back behind him as he departs the library, all the while ignoring Cas’s footsteps forcibly following him down the hall.

* * *

Later, after an evening spent researching with little success, Dean drags Cas into his worst nightmare: his bedroom.

“Dude, a little privacy, please,” Dean growls over his shoulder. Even with his back to Cas, he feels too naked to continue undressing.

Cas glowers at the bedroom wall, staring at the square of tiles to the right of Dean’s mirror. He sighs and, with deep reluctance, turns a cheek fractionally towards Dean. “The door’s too far away. I can’t stand on the other side of it.”

Dean glances across the bow of his arm, confirming once again that Cas isn’t peeking. Assured, he continues to strip out of his shirt and jeans, his footing briefly stumbling when his ankle hooks on a pant leg. He slips on a clean undershirt and keeps on the same boxers, figuring it’s worth waiting until morning before swapping out for a fresh pair. Maybe Sam and Rowena will have a solution by then.

His socks kicked off, feet bare, Dean breathes a relieved sigh. He twists around, finds Cas’s position unchanged from his staring match with the wall.

Dean frowns, shaking out his worn shirt. “You standing there all night?”

“If I can,” Cas tells the wall.

Mouthing mimicry, his eyes rolling, Dean heads for his bed and pulls down sheets. A soft grunt comes behind him, accompanied by abrupt footsteps, the sound of Cas staggering back. When Dean looks, Cas has much the same posture as before, except now he’s three feet away from the wall.

“Seriously?” Dean asks, more loudly than is appreciated by the crushed quiet of the room.

The back of Cas’s head bows, his chin dipping toward his chest. The slope of his shoulders remains defeated. “You don’t want me here. And I don’t want to upset you. This is the best solitude I can offer you.”

Dean softens in spite of himself, biting back a vicious instinct telling him to snap back. He moves for the foot of his bed, sitting there instead of its head. It’s enough to cut Cas the slack he needs to turn around, but still, Cas doesn’t.

Dean knuckles at his eye socket, head thrumming through the list of what best he could say.

“I’m angry, yeah,” Dean musters eventually. “That you didn’t tell me about Jack. That Jack—and then Mom—”

Dean bites his cheeks. Stares down at his trembling hands, folding them together. Not now, not this. He can’t. The coal inside his heart flares within him, painful and bright.

“You can sit on the bed,” Dean says quietly, pushing up from his post. “I’m going to sleep.”

The last thing Dean sees—from the peripheral of his eye, just as he turns off the bedside light—is Cas crouching like a cowering dog for the corner of Dean’s bed.

* * *

Sleep hangs just out of reach from Dean once again, as has become its pattern since his mother’s untimely death. Dean plays the part, lays still beneath his cool sheets, closes his eyes against the dark. He plays the part, but though sleep visits, it never dares to stay.

Behind him, little more than an arm’s reach away, Cas shuffles where he also is resting, prone and outstretched along the bed. Dean knows without looking behind him that Cas has laid down along the edge of the bed, his head on the farthest side of the pillow. He can feel, in the dark, how the entirety of Cas’s body bends purposefully away from Dean’s. How unnatural that forced space between them feels.

Dean also can tell, without looking, that Cas lays awake beside him. Not because of any special cue; he just knows Cas well enough to tell whenever he’s tuned in to Dean’s breathing.

Seems Cas knows him well enough, too.

“Somehow,” Cas rasps, quiet, “you’re angrier now than the first time I ever watched you sleep.”

Dean shuts his eyes against the sudden sweep of nostalgia. The old way he’d shoot out of bed to find Cas standing there, patiently waiting for him. The patent frown and fluffy bedhead that Dean somehow came to love.

Anger in the midst of an apocalypse.

He aches for easier times.

“Not angry,” Dean murmurs. “Embarrassed.”

It isn’t an answer, though it confirms the worst in what Cas said. A long and silent moment hangs between them, settling like a sheet atop their bodies. Then: “You’re right. I should have told you. About Jack. Maybe if I had…”

Dean inhales sharply through his nose. Holds it. Holds until a stinging settles between his ribs.

Maybe if Cas had told him, Mary would still be alive.

Except, no. They know better than that, now.

Shuffling around, Dean turns onto his side, facing Cas. He feels like the type of sleepdrunk that makes confessions easier to give.

“Chuck wanted her dead,” Dean says. “For the drama of it.” He scoffs, breath dry as grave dirt. “He wanted to see me kill Jack.”

Cas’s eyes glitter in the dark. His head shifts Dean’s way. Dean holds quiet, waiting to see what Cas will say.

Except Cas does something simpler than sharing words. His hand drifts across the lonely expanse between them, stretching until his knuckles bump the side of Dean’s wrist.

Dean flips his hand over without needing to be asked, and Cas slips his fingers through Dean’s fingers. His hand is warm in Dean’s. Comforting. Far better than the embers that have warmed Dean until now.

Soft as the night, Cas says, “Dean, I am so, so sorry. For everything that has happened to our family.”

Dean trembles as if struck, his eyes squeezing shut. Something fierce thickens at the base of his throat, building until it all but closes off his breath.

He squeezes Cas’s hand, as he recovers. Cas squeezes back, his grip pulsing. He holds Dean’s fist between both of his hands.

This is better than sifting through ashes, holding out hope for decaying sparks of light.

Dean’s heart coal flares wildly, before it gives out. That last flash of hurt before succumbing to the cool wash of grief.

“Me too, Cas,” he says thickly. “Me too.”

* * *

In the morning, Dean wakes to warmth, and darkness. A night spent submerged in sleep.

Behind him, along the length of his back, is the weight of another's body. Solid. Warm like a bonfire. A soft cheek rests against his shoulder, breath stirring the fine hairs along Dean’s neck.

Slowly, Dean fishes himself loose from the arm draped over his waist. He pushes himself out of bed. Stumbles around, foot caught in his bedsheets, twisting around in half-steps. He finds his sink after a meandering path past his dresser and desk, splashes cool water on his face until he feels more like himself.

Behind him, Cas snuffles and sighs, seemingly satisfied by burying himself deeper into the warmth Dean left on his half of the bed.

Dean’s bed.

On the other side of the room.

Swiveling around, Dean stretches out his arm in a quick estimation of distance. He sidesteps to the door and, fumbling open the handle, takes a further three steps out into the hall.

A laugh bursts loose from him, to which Dean immediately clams up, his dimples dampening the grin threatening to overwhelm his face.

He lands roughly on Cas’s side of the bed, pressed into his back. He shakes Cas’s arm. Cas grumbles and wriggles muzzily away, frowning as he rolls onto his other side.

“Cas, c’mon.” Dean leans down, close to Cas’s ear. He fits his hand around Cas’s shoulder, tugging gently. “The tethering is gone.”

Cas cracks an eye open at that, his head rising off the pillow. He awakens at an ungodly rapid pace, falling out of bed and following Dean into the hall where, facing each other, they both purposefully back away.

“What happened?” Dean wonders, as he closes back in on Cas.

“Something simple,” Cas says, gaze darting as he thinks. “If the tethering wanted to keep us close together…”

Realization dawning, Cas holds out his hand. Nodding, Dean finishes the sentiment by filling Cas’s palm with his own. “Something to the point, I guess. Except who’d want us to...?”

“It’s grace,” Cas cuts in, locking their clasped hands together. “Do you think—?”

“Maybe?” Dean answers. “But, c’mon—not like the kid had much time before—”

Drawn over by the ruckus, Sam appears around the corner from his room, scrubbing his eyes as he walks. He blinks at Dean and Cas’s hand-holding, frowning until his eyes gain focus. “Did the tethering get worse?” he asks, glancing between them.

“No,” says a delicate voice from behind Sam, revealing Rowena coming up behind him, wearing Sam’s bedrobe. “If I’m sensing anything, it’s that the tethering has been broken.”

“You two?” Laughing, Dean draws a finger between his brother and Rowena. “Oh man, Sammy. You’re never living this one down.”

Sam fires back, something like, _Same back at you_ , at the same time Rowena is tetching at him, but Dean doesn’t care. He is already busy with the man in his arms, drawn in toward the angel still holding his hand.

**Author's Note:**

> rebloggable on [tumblr](https://vaudelin.tumblr.com/post/189986666048/hold-me-closer).


End file.
